Identification of a serial digital video signal from a single source or even a few sources generally presents little difficulties. However, in a typical broadcast facility, many serial digital video signals exist, and identification of each signal often proves problematic, particularly as the signals undergo routing through one or more devices, such as a cross-point switcher, some times referred to as a cross-point matrix. Presently, to positively identify a given serial digital video signal during routing, descrambling and de-serialization of the signal must occur in order to decode the identification information. Carrying out these processes requires a significant amount of hardware. Thus, in a system having many serial digital video signals, providing the necessary descrambling and de-serialization hardware often proves impractical from a cost, space and power consumption perspective. For this reason, broadcast facilities typically rely completely on routing control system status information to determine which input connects to a given output in the cross-point matrix. Such reliance incurs the disadvantage that no automated method exists for checking the actual signal present at a given cross-point matrix output and alerting the user should the status information prove erroneous.